Because seating is limited in the auditorium, tickets (two per person) are required for the free event and can be obtained beginning Wednesday, Jan. 22 at 10 a.m. through the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts box office. Tickets may also be reserved online (tickets.arts.emory.edu) and by phone (404-727-5050) with a $4 per order service fee and the option to be mailed or held at will call. No tickets will be mailed after Friday, Feb. 7.

Books and a limited-edition broadside will be for sale at the reading, and a signing event will be held at 5:30 p.m. at the Robert W. Woodruff Library on campus.

The reading will coincide with the opening celebration of the exhibition “Seamus Heaney: The Music of What Happens” at 5:30 p.m. in the Schatten Gallery at the Woodruff Library. As a student at Queen’s University in Belfast, Muldoon studied under Heaney, and the two became great friends. Muldoon gave the eulogy at the funeral for Heaney, who died Aug. 30, 2013.

“Paul Muldoon is known as a word wizard – his poetry is innovative, allusive and exhilarating,” says Geraldine Higgins, director of Emory’s Irish Studies Program. “His playfulness extends to the idea of poetic form as well as to expectations about the conventional Irish poem.”

Muldoon inaugurated the Irish Studies program at Emory 10 years ago with a wonderful poetry reading and a limited-edition broadside of his poem “The Coyote,” Higgins recalls. “We are delighted to welcome him back to Emory for a reading that will not fail to engage, elevate and entertain his audience,” she says.

“We are so excited to be kicking off the 2014 season of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series with a reading from Paul Muldoon,” says Kevin Young, curator of MARBL’s literary collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, who has directed the series since 2005. “Not only is he an electrifying reader, but his presence on campus will bring renewed attention to the incredibly rich archive of his papers at Emory, as well as our extensive collection of Irish literary materials.”

Muldoon the poet

Muldoon, who became the poetry editor for The New Yorker in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2002 collection “Moy Sand and Gravel” (2002), which also earned him the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry.

His other notable books of poetry include “New Weather” (1973), published while he was a student at Queen’s University; “Mules” (1977); “Why Brownlee Left” (1980), “Quoof” (1983); “Meeting the British” (1987); “The Annals of Chile” (1994), which won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry; “Hay” (1998); “Horse Latitudes” (2006), shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; and “Maggot” (2010).

He has won numerous other awards, including the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.”

About Muldoon

Born in County Armagh in Northern Ireland in 1951, Muldoon completed his studies at Queen’s University and worked for the BBC in Belfast as a radio and television producer from 1973 to 1986. He was the University of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999-2004, and his lectures were published as “The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures in Poetry” in 2006. Muldoon has also taught at Cambridge and Columbia universities; the University of California at Berkeley; and the University of Massachusetts. He has lived in the U.S. since 1987 and currently teaches poetry as the Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Muldoon has also written translations, libretti, rock lyrics (for Warren Zevon and for The Handsome Family and two bands he plays in, the Wayside Shrines and Rackett) and several books for children.